In Ancient Athens the great philosopher Socrates lived and breathed for justice. He ironically died for unjust reasons of course but he still lived for what was right. Two thousand four hundred years after his death however, the Nazis managed to destroy the very essence of justice, and life, for millions of their victims. In Auschwitz, as with all concentration camps, justice was non-existent. There are very important things missing from Auschwitz that Socrates would have considered essential for justice to exist.
Let us start by confirming above all things that the main point of punishment is a consequence of wrong doing: the degree of punishment agreeing with the degree of crime (hopefully but not always the case). That is the basic idea of justice in my mind. For Primo Levi and twelve million others of the Nazi’s victims in the concentration camps, this was most certainly not the case. Yes the Nazi’s did have political and criminal prisoners that somewhat earned their spot there but the large majority of the prisoners never did anything wrong whatsoever. This is the first and most clear way in which justice was destroyed. Their crime was existing, whether they Jewish, gypsy, handicap, or what have you. On top of that, the crimes against humanity that the Nazis committed were so horrible, so grotesque and unspeakable, that the only deserving victims of such treatment were the ones responsible for it. Socrates stated "Happiness surely does not consist in being delivered from evils, but in never having them." (Gorgias)
The second method in which justice was destroyed in Auschwitz was the deprivation of humanly necessities. This is unjust because they are reducing and devolving the just mind of the prisoners. Within the camps, prisoners were not treated like humans and therefore adapted animalistic behavior necessary to survive. The “ordinary moral world”, ceases